WHO WE ARE

We are a group of early career neuroscientists from Engineering and Medicine Faculties at Imperial College London.

Cornelius Donat is a biologist and post-doctoral researcher at the Division of Brain Sciences, Department of Medicine. His primary research interests are disorders of the brain, particularly Traumatic Brain Injury (TBI) and other neurodegenerative diseases.

To study the pathophysiological processes of TBI, he is emplyoing in vivo models, combined with high-field MRI and different molecular imaging techniques. Cornelius aims to establish a reliable platform for translating new imaging techniques into clinical practice and preclinical investigation of new therapeutic options.

Apart from neuroscience, he is also interested in the structure of totalitarian states, the organizational and linguistic strategies they employ and the dynamic interplay between groups, individuals and society.

Ines Violante is a Sir Henry Wellcome Fellow at Imperial College London and University College London, investigating the use of brain stimulation to target the function of large-scale networks that sustain cognitive functions. Her research combines functional magnetic resonance imaging, spectroscopy and electroencephalography to understand how brain stimulation can be used to modulate brain dynamics and behavioural performance. She is interested in how brain oscillations mediate long-range connectivity and particularly how neurostimultaion could be used to improve network communication following brain injury.

Katerina Kandylaki is a post doctoral researcher at the Department of Bioengineering at Imperial College London. She graduated in January 2016 with highest honours from the Philipps-University of Marburg, Germany, where she studied the neurobiological underpinnings of language processing in the group of Prof. Ina Bornkessel-Schlesewsky. Katerina's goal is to reveal shared neural principles of language and other cognitive functions, such as social or musical cognition. She is especially interested in the concept of animacy, both from a linguistic and a neurobiological perspective. Another key aspect of her research is the focus on natural linguistic stimuli such as auditory stories. In such natural stimulation an experiment can approach more realistic settings and its findings would generalise better to everyday language experience.

Dr. Mark Steadman is a Research Associate in the Department of Bioengineering. He is investigating the neural representation of complex sound in the auditory cortex. The auditory system must represent sounds selectively; the representation of ‘cat’ must be different to ‘hat’. At the same time, it enables us to recognise sounds despite acoustical variations; ‘cat’ still sounds like ‘cat’ no matter who says it. Understanding the neural mechanisms underlying both this selectivity and invariance is a central question in sensory neuroscience.

Yann Sweeney is a postdoctoral researcher in the lab of Claudia Clopath, Imperial College London. He studied theoretical physics in Trinity College Dublin before completing a PhD in computational neuroscience under the supervision of Matthias Hennig at the University of Edinburgh and Jeanette Hellgren-Kotaleski at KTH, Stockholm. Yann uses computational methods to study how synaptic plasticity alters cortical connectivity during perceptual learning. He collaborates widely with experimental neuroscientists, and is particularly interested in linking mechanistic descriptions of synaptic plasticity with large-scale neural circuit recordings.